Today’s consumers expect perks and rewards for being loyal customers. The Wildfire platform helps clients quickly establish loyalty programs and ensure consumers don’t have to jump through hoops to take advantage of them.
Wildfire is a white-label loyalty, rewards, and cashback platform with touchpoints at each stage of the online shopping journey. It connects consumers to brands via search results, promotes consideration with cashback browser extensions, boosts conversions with digital coupons, and rewards word-of-mouth sharing.
Dominyka Bucelyte, Publisher Development Manager at impact.com, wanted to find out more about this unique model, so she reached out to Megan Stephenson, International Merchant Development at Wildfire Systems, to dig deeper.
Dominyka Bucelyte: First off, can you give us an overview of the value proposition Wildfire offers to both publishers and merchants?
Megan Stephenson: Wildfire works predominantly with financial institutions and fintech companies to build out its loyalty platform. The platform enables advertisers to promote their brands within the loyalty and rewards programs of notable companies like Microsoft and Revolut.
Giving advertisers infinite opportunities to incrementally grow their affiliate program, Wildfire surfaces advertisers to massive audiences of potential new customers. The platform accomplishes this by promoting advertisers to the millions of end-user shoppers that its partners bring to the table.
Advertisers can quickly scale their affiliate programs without gradually building relationships publisher-by-publisher. Wildfire’s consumer reach continues growing, with its business development team forging new partnerships daily.
Most partners seek to expand engagement by offering consumers a loyalty platform where they can earn rewards and save money with specific retail merchants.
Dominyka: What’s the advantage of offering a white-label solution?
Megan: Wildfire’s enterprise-level, white-label rewards platform connects established companies with high-quality consumer audiences, allowing them to offer cashback rewards when their customers shop online.
Partners collaborate with Wildfire so their customers can enjoy the benefits of a loyalty rewards program without the time, effort, and expense of building one in-house.
Wildfire’s suite of tools also includes turnkey shopping companions that meet the customer where they are, delivering rewards opportunities at just the right moment during their shopping journey.
Dominyka: Companies often view loyalty programs as being all about customer retention, but you also promote them as a customer acquisition strategy. How does that work?
Megan: Wildfire’s full-funnel collection of tools engages consumers well before the acquisition stage. Engagement eventually translates into retention by creating word of mouth through advocacy.
Dominyka: How do you find new merchants to bring into your program?
Megan: Wildfire consistently grows its advertiser portfolio by meeting with network teams, as well as one-on-one with new and existing networks. Similarly, the business development team seeks out companies that could give our advertisers additional opportunities to grow their affiliate programs.
Dominyka: What is the role of the impact.com platform in building and managing merchant relationships? Is impact.com also part of the publisher experience or workflow?
Megan: impact.com plays an integral role in helping Wildfire build and expand our merchant portfolio across all categories and geographies. Clients like Microsoft, Revolut, and up-and-coming financial and fintech companies can partner with advertisers through impact.com to incentivize customers to shop at various brands.
Dominyka: What are some of the trends you’re seeing in the loyalty arena? With so many types of rewards programs available, competition for consumer attention must be fierce.
Megan: The loyalty and rewards industry continues to diversify, and the financial sector is taking more and more interest in creating digital consumer journeys. They see the benefit of having a loyalty platform that engages their consumers while providing the added advantage of rewards.
Wildfire is built to service these sectors. We don’t do card-linked offers, and we don’t ever plan to. We focus our energy on ecommerce.
These companies need streamlined technology and a publisher base that supports internal acquisition and retention strategies. We help our clients go live faster with a consumer experience that’s proven to be successful and can customize to any use case.
Dominyka: What are the top three factors that make Wildfire stand apart in today’s competitive market?
Megan: We have a few major features that make us stand out:
- Established consumer base: Wildfire works with companies that have pre-existing, high-quality consumer audiences.
- Full-funnel suite of tools: These tools allow any business to engage its members by offering loyalty and rewards when shopping online — no matter where they stand in the funnel.
- Alternative merchant alerts: The shopping companion feature gives merchants additional exposure by automatically displaying related merchants if a shopper visits a site without affiliate links.
Dominyka: What advice do you have for a publisher that wants to establish a successful rewards program or a merchant that wants to sign on? What are some pitfalls to avoid?
Megan: For publishers, remember the importance of building a robust advertiser portfolio that meets the needs of various audiences. For merchants, my advice is to work with Wildfire. You’ll gain access to an existing and growing high-quality consumer base.
Want to connect with rewarding partners like Wildfire? Just reach out to emea-publishers@impact.com.
